The sea roars, the turf whispers – and champions listen.
There are few places in golf where the landscape itself seems to set the tempo for a major. Royal Portrush, perched on the ragged edge of Antrim’s north coast, is one of them. The Atlantic rolls in just beyond the dunes, its salt spray carried inland on a wind that can alternate – without notice – between lullaby and lash. Players stepping onto the first tee hear more than gallery murmurs; they hear history knocking around in the dunes.
Portrush last hosted The Open in 2019, when Shane Lowry etched his name into lore with a performance of equal parts nerve and nuance. Before that, you have to rewind to 1951 – Max Faulkner, persimmon heads, and wool sweaters stiff with rain. In between those championships, the course matured quietly, its fairways tightening like violin strings and its bunkers settling into deeper thought. Changes came – a lengthened “Calamity Corner,” realigned greens, a pair of new holes carved from the Valley course – but the heart of Portrush remained: wind, rhythm, and unspoken demands.
This year the Claret Jug returns, and with it the modern field of power fades and TrackMan yardages. Yet Portrush is less impressed by raw distance than by an imagination willing to shape a ball on command. Ask anyone who has stared across the chasm at the par-three 16th: flight-window decisions here feel as consequential as club selection at Amen Corner. Overswing and you tumble into a gorse-filled abyss; under-commit and the ball never quite reaches its arc. Between those extremes lives the shot a champion must find.
Navigating Portrush is not simply an exercise in solid contact. It is a dialogue with the wind off the Atlantic, a negotiation with turf that can bruise an ego as quickly as it rewards conviction. The best players will arrive with statistics and swing keys, but the winner will be the one who listens – to the sea’s cadence, to the hush of tightly clipped fescue, to the intuition that says now or wait.
For the rest of us, watching The Open here offers a reminder that artistry in golf begins long before impact. It takes shape in the practiced pause on the tee, in the willingness to curve a ball into a breeze, in the humility required to lay back from a green guarded by deception more than distance. Portrush invites that level of craft – and punishes anything less.
When the first scorecard is signed on Sunday evening, the champion will have endured four rounds of shifting skies and internal reckonings. They will lift the Claret Jug knowing they conquered something elemental, something that roared and whispered in equal measure.
And we, safely on the couch or behind the ropes, will remember why links golf still holds us in its spell: because places like Royal Portrush demand more than skill. They demand a kind of listening.
